There is a growing demand for switching Buck Converters. A very important feature of buck converters is the capability to withstand an Output Short Circuit.
Currently most of the commercial or known solutions to protect a Buck from a damage of a short circuit rely on as follows:                External components;        Cycle to cycle current limit;        Frequency Foldback Technique;        Hiccup Mode;        
It is obvious that the use of external components is expensive and it doesn't contribute to robustness of the converter itself.
The Cycle to Cycle current limit and the Frequency Foldback Technique, as outlined later, need a complex design effort and, if not carefully designed, does not always guarantee a reliable short circuit protection.
Moreover in the above protections the control loop must be carefully checked to avoid instability issues.
The Hiccup Mode instead creates a huge in-rush of current every cycle and for this reason it can create problems at the system level.
All those methods rely on the designer's ability to identify the worst case condition and define the trade-off between frequency, stability, duty-cycle, minimum turn-off time, minimum turn-on time, inductor and capacitance parameters.
It is a challenge to designers of buck converters or boost converters to overcome the disadvantages mentioned above.